A pond in Oxford University Parks just produced the kind of biology story that makes textbook authors quietly update their drafts. A microscopic ciliate called Oligohymenophorea sp. PL0344, scooped up almost by accident during a sequencing test, turns out to be running its own private fork of the genetic code. And not a small fork either. It rewrote two of the three universal stop signs that every living thing on Earth uses to tell a cell where a gene ends. Dr. Jamie McGowan, a postdoctoral scientist at the Earlham Institute, was testing a new single-cell sequencing pipeline. He needed something to feed into it, so he picked a random protist from a freshwater sample. The protist did not behave.…